Tag: Advice

Today’s Bloganuary prompt is, “What is a cause you are passionate about and why?” The prompt brings charity and non-profits to my mind. While I support organizations trying to make the world better in that manner, I think my cause or principle is more closely related to seeking a specific kind of truth related to figuring out how things effect things. The joy of discovery is why I am drawn to data and science.

To that end, I have enjoyed seeing some of the effective altruism movement. I am fascinated that supplementing salt could be a cheap and effective education intervention or that reducing poverty clears up some historic problems on its own.

However, I also believe that we will never have a perfect understanding of the world and that there will always be more left to discover. That means leaving respect and room for what we can’t measure. It’s still worth being kind to me, even if there is no measurable benefit. I believe in throwing sidewalk earthworms back to the dirt after a rain even if I know I can’t help them all. I aim to live in balance with nature and our environment. I’d prefer to invent a systemic engineering solution that solves this problem for all earthworms everywhere, but that’s not the world I live in yet. Until then, I do what I can where I am.

In that sense, I am passionate about principles of how we relate to each other. I’m passionate about democracy, though I hope to see an even better solution emerge in my lifetime. The fundamental rights that I care about include voter’s rights, freedom of speech, press, belief (also referred to as religion or opinion and expression), assembly, protest, privacy, travel, and equal protection under the law including rights of the accused to a trial where they are innocent until proven guilty. Whenever possible, I think communities should be self governing in that they should both have agency and responsibility for their decisions.

It is also important to me that when we disagree, we do so with decency. It feels to me that the society I participate in has gotten meaner and more self-centered in my lifetime and I try to counteract that, but am also pragmatic that survival requires a certain toughness. Life is hard enough. Let’s not purposefully make it harder on one another.

The life lesson that I think nearly everyone can benefit from learning and that I try to remind myself of regularly is that we each only get one life. This is not a dress rehearsal. We can create do-overs in some senses (if you are both still alive, it’s never too late to apologize), but the river of time flows ever onward. There is a balance between sufficiently planning for tomorrow and remembering that tomorrow is not guaranteed. Celebrate that you woke up today by doing something for the you you are today, but also do something for future you to appreciate.

Today’s post is about assumptions, but it is interesting that the prompt jumps to incorrect assumptions. Shared assumptions are a foundation of a functioning society. For example, most successful drivers assume that most fellow drivers on the road will follow the traffic rules, and move away from cars that seem to be having a hard time doing so for safety reasons. We all rely on a lot of assumptions to get through a day. They are the things we can take for granted, do on autopilot, and suppose will just work the way we expect.

Typically violated assumptions result in interest, because we are checking to see if we need to update our mental models of the world. For example, in the area of Germany where I live, people frequently assume that I’m Belgian or maybe Dutch when I struggle with the language. That’s because I could literally bike to those countries from here. When I tell them I am American, usually there is interest in what I am doing here and so on. If the people we are interacting with file their error in judgement as an exception or update their heuristics, everything works well.

Assumptions only become limiting or dangerous when we both do not fit the norm and it is not easy to update someone else’s assumptions or it has some sort of cost to do so. For example, if the person I am talking to either loves or hates Americans, things can get weird if I don’t further follow their idea about this thing they abstractly love or hate. While almost everyone has many properties that are close to average (stereotypes come from somewhere), almost no one follows all averages or stereotypes exactly, because we are all our own collection of traits and experiences. We also use our own assumptions and the assumptions of others to fashion together our identity.

In my experience, the more we are completely ourselves and transparent about it, the more space we make for others to also be authentic. Exploring my own assumptions has given me way more benefit than worrying about what other people are thinking about me. On the other hand, being able to effectively influence others relies on understanding their assumptions and manipulating them. Maybe I would be better off with a better understanding of when others are making incorrect assumptions and fixing them or using them to my advantage.

So tell me, how do you identify incorrect assumptions about you? What do you do in that situation?

I signed up for the Bloganuary Challenge to help get into the habit of posting more. The first prompt is what advice I would give my teenage self. I’m not sure I would give her any advice, because I think she did pretty good on her own and I wouldn’t want to throw her off. Many people say that they would tell their former self to not worry so much, but I see how her anxiety and ambition motivated her to do cool things when there was no guarantee that she would. That’s not to say that I did not make mistakes, learn, or have regrets. However, on the balance things have turned out more than ok so far.

I now have almost teenage kids of my own, so I can also talk about the advice I give to them. Today I was cuddling with my daughter watching the part of Dirty Dancing where Baby confronts the snobby waiter, Robby. He says that some people count and some people don’t and tries to give Baby his copy of the Fountainhead. I commented to my daughter that she should not date any boys in college who are really into Ayn Rand. A few minutes later, my husband, Rob, came in and we shared that we were discussing Ayn Rand. His reply was something like, “Oh yeah, I liked her stuff in college.” So apparently now I live in a sitcom. So maybe my best advice is to live with your own laugh track.